Why The iPhone 7 Might Be The Last iPhone I Own

On Tuesday Apple announced among other things the iPhone X a very anticipated and leaked phone we pretty much knew everything about it before the event but me and many others still had a lot of questions some were answered some were not The iPhone x is the first iPhone to have an OLED screen which brings a bezzeless design something we have seen on the android side for about a year along with a bunch of niceties like Qi charging (Wireless Charging) again on android for years before the iPhone but the thing that i want to focus on is something that’s not in the iPhone x and what it was replaced by anybody that has owned an iPhone in the last four years has probably used touch id which is the fingerprint reader that allows you to use your finger to login i have owned 2 iPhones and iPad with this ability and i love it my current phone is an iPhone 7 and with iPhone 7 the home button where the touch id sensor is located is not actually a button anymore it it feels like one but it’s not this change was preparing us for the day where they get rid of the home button and put the touch id sensor under the screen while apparently this was harder than Apple thought so they weren’t able to pull it off there’s no phones right now that have it under the screen but all android phones have a fingerprint reader including all the bezzeless phones including the Samsung S8 the Samsung Note 8 (I will ignore the stupid placement of the fingerprint sensor on the Samsung phones because while putting it beside the camera is stupid design it still has one) other phones that have it the essential phone , Lg G6 and non-bezzeless phones like google pixel and you might ask where do they put it they put it on the back in the centre of the phone right where your finger will naturally fall unless your Samsung but Apple decided that they were not gonna do this and instead replace it and i have problems with this because this decision was very much a form over function decision which means instead of caring about function they cared about design and while the iPhone x is beautiful a fingerprint reader on the back would not of hurt it but instead they replaced it with Face id which is face recognition which uses apples true depth camera system which uses ir cameras and ir floodlighting and a dot projector to help the phone scan your face it also uses neural networks (Machine Learning) to learn and improve face recognition which is awesome. so here’s the thing apples chief VP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller while talking about the iPhone on stage he showed a stat which is how many people could possibly use their face to get into somebody else’s iPhone compared to that with a finger and touch id and with touch id the stat is according to apple is 1 in 500000 and for face id 1in 1 million

so while that’s a good statistic that’s not the statistic i wanted them to show the statistics about how many attempts it will take face id compared to touch id to recognize you and I’m guessing that number is more in touch ids favour than face id because of the nature of the two technologies touch id is a direct contact authentication where you have to directly touch it where face id is very much indirect it uses cameras and other things mentioned above to scan your face at a certain distance and while i think Apple has most likely got face id working really well and is certainly secure because that is definitely one of Apples strengths there are are some inherent problems with face id so the first one is just the fact that you will have to adapt to the technology what I mean is you will have to change your posture to use it in some cases with touch id you didn’t have to you just extend out your arm and touch your finger to it with face id if it’s sitting on a nightstand while you’re in bed you will have to reach over and get it and position it in front of your face the technology should adapt to you not the other way around the other thing is while the VP of software for apple crag Fredericki was demoing the face id it failed the first time and apple said in a statement to Yahoo that before the event people that were not enrolled in face id were touching the phones and it was attempting to log them in so when he went to do it locked him out and made him enter the pin apple said this wasn’t a fail it was the way it was designed to work and he grabbed a second iPhone that I guess hadn’t been handled and it worked . but people are not gonna have backup so if this happens you will have to enter your pin and you might say what’s the big deal how often will that happen well heres the thing if you fortunate enough to own one of these phones and are out in public with it people are gonna want to see it and touch it and just the mere glance at the screen will activate face id and will make it try to authenticate and will fail without the user really knowing because they won’t be reading the screen they will be marvelling at the phone the longer they marvel the more attempts it will make and eventually lock you out so if every time i go to show my phone to someone its gonna lock me out that’s gonna be pain the other thing is there has been a setting on iPhones for a while that if you have it enabled what it will do is if you have so many failed attempts it will erase your phone imagine if that happens with face id because if someone’s looking at your phone and it’s making false attempts it could quickly reach that threshold apple still hasn’t told us how it’s gonna deal with that if it they deal with it at all don’t get me wrong I’m glad they included item just wish they included touch id as well an give users a choice because the problem is when they introduced touch id in the iPhone 5s in 2013 there was nothing that relied on it so had a year if you lived in the us or 2-3 years if you lived in other countries before apple pay was introduced in 2014 with the iPhone 6 and 6 plus and the apple watch and rolled out in other country in 2015 and 2016 and continues to be rolled out in 2017 so touch id has had time to mature with out having anything to rely on face id is not getting that maturity time it needs to work out of the box and it needs to work 99.999 percent of the time it like touch id or better because if it doesn’t its going to affect the usage of apple pay and I know people will say I’m being too hard on the iPhone x but I’m actually not you got to keep in mind im from Canada and in Canada this phone costs 1319 dollars to put that in perspective this phone costs unlocked the same price as my macbook now I know people will say well most people will get it on a contract but even on contract in Canada it will be expensive but based on what the iphone 8 costs I’m guessing it will 7 or 8 hundred dollars on a 2 year term I don’t know the pricing but thats my guess so if Im spending that amount I expect to have everything the iPhone 8 has plus additional but with iPhone x they took and important feature away this kind of highlights another mindset of apples which is a very 2010 mindset which is that they are the only premium smart phone maker and in 2010 that might of been true but its 2017 and thats not true anymore theres a lot of premium phones that include fingerprint and some include facial recognition as well as fingerprint and a lot these phones are less expensive and offer the same features so I will be covering my thoughts on android in a different post but only time will tell if i switch or not I won’t be buying a phone till next year so will see what happens but my one fear on the android side is in a couple years the apple effect will set in and manufactures will do the exact same thing and replace finger print with face recognition I really do hope not but only time will tell

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